The structure factor of dense two-dimensional polymer solutions Original Research Article

According to the generalized Porod law the intramolecular structure factor image of compact objects with surface dimension image scales as image in the intermediate range of the wave vector q with d being the dimension of the embedding space, N the mass of the objects and image their typical size. By means of molecular-dynamics simulations of a bead-spring model with chain lengths up to image it is shown that dense self-avoiding polymers in strictly two dimensions (image) adopt compact configurations of surface dimension image. In agreement with the generalized Porod law the Kratky representation of image thus reveals a nonmonotonous behavior with image. Using a similar data analysis we argue briefly that melts of non-concatenated rings in three dimensions become marginally compact with image, i.e. image, for asymptotically long chains.